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Cape Town - The Nokia Lumia 900 makes a direct proposition: If you like Facebook, you will love this smartphone.

While most modern smartphones integrate with social networks, the top-of-the-range Lumia is so tightly woven into the social networks that one could be forgiven for thinking this device was designed with help from Palo Alto.

That doesn't mean the Lumia is bad; on the contrary, it's completely unique in the smartphone market and retains the traditional excellent Nokia build quality that made the 3310 a legend.

The one-piece polycarbonate body (read plastic) doesn't feel cheap and the device does give a neat fit and feel in the hand at 160g.

And you'll want it in your hand often to look at that high-definition 11cm display. It's covered with Gorilla Glass to protect against disasters that will no doubt result when all and sundry want to hold it and look at pictures or watch video.

Apps

The main camera on the Lumia is 8 megapixel with Carl Zeiss optics, an f/2.2 aperture and dual LED flash. The result is decent photography that makes point-and-shoot cameras completely redundant as many high end smartphones are doing.

Video is respectable as well, despite a somewhat irritating feature where the device will not zoom while shooting video.

Premium devices on the Android platform are able to zoom as well as take still pictures during video recording and Nokia may have missed a trick here.

Using the Lumia is easy and intuitive: The home screen can be customised with apps, as well as popular contacts and web pages. Of course, there is no massive collection of apps yet, but the Lumia does many things well-enough that one doesn't miss downloading hundreds of apps.

Facebook is tightly integrated with contacts and image gallery that may be disconcerting, but for those who want to separate their Facebook life from real life, one can thankfully disable the integration with contacts.

The device displays images and updates from Facebook friends as well as organising images by date, album and source. It also integrates social network contacts and calendar information.

The Windows Phone 7.5 Mango operating system is smooth even though the processor driving the Lumia is somewhat slower at 1.4GHz than the top-end dual core and quad core processors in competing devices.

Content

It's quite an experience using a different operating system and the elegance is noticeable in hundreds of details from the menu bounces when you don't swipe up completely to the themed home screen.

One of the benefits of working with Microsoft is that the Lumia comes with a fully functioning Office editor that allows road warriors to keep working without having to fire up a laptop. Nokia's mapping program is independent of Google and also delivers real-time traffic updates.

On board is 16GB of storage that you can only access with the included USB cable and Nokia has stuck with the Zune only method of synching of content. Though the software has been refreshed to look neater and be more user friendly, one does miss the ease of drag-and-drop on the N9.

The Nokia Lumia is the new kid on the block and offers a refreshing change when everyone around has an Android device. It has a recommended retail price of R7 999.

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